Re: Federation protocols

On 30 May 2013 20:26, Michał 'rysiek' Woźniak <rysiek@fwioo.pl> wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I'm #NewHere, to use a popular cliche on federated social networks. I am an
> active user of Diaspora, Friendica and StatusNet (soon to be converted to
> pump.io).
>
> I am also a stern proponent of free and open federation protocols and
> networks.
>
> For a while now I have seen Friendica as a great project, allowing the
> different federated social networks (Diaspora and OStatus-compatible) to be
> able to communicate and for a single, huge federated network.
>
> I am however baffled by the different approaches and protocols being used
> in
> distributed social network projects. With the introduction of Red, pump.io
> ,
> tent.io and other projects not exactly compatible with protocols already
> utilised, I feel we are not heading in the right direction.
>
> What I feel we need is a single, extensible, well-defined protocol, or
> suite
> of protocols, that we can build a single, compatible, interoperable
> federated
> social network upon.
>
> Right now we have OStatus, Diaspora's protocol, DFRN (used by Friendica)
> and
> the protocols that are used by Red, tent.io and pump.io, that I am not
> even
> sure are properly defined anywhere.
>
> If we do not get together and devise a single, workable protocol for all
> such
> services to use, the Network Effect will always work against us, instead of
> working for us:
> http://rys.io/en/88
>
> So my questions are:
>  - is this the right list to start this discussion?
>  - is there any work done in this regard?
>  - if some, where are we on that road?
>

The web was designed to be social from day 1.  There are standards for this
kind of thing, but they are highly underused, with perhaps, the exception
of facebook.

There is a tendency to want to create, rather than, reuse.  However the new
'protocols' tend to scale at most to themselves, and it's relatively rare
that heterogeneous systems can communicate.

This group made a big bet on OStatus about 2-3 years ago, and arguably it
has not exceeded expectations.

There seems to be an effort to steer things back to standards and best
practices, from a high level perspective.  I'm optimistic that this new
approach will lead to interop, for those that get on board ...


>
> --
> Pozdrawiam
> Michał "rysiek" Woźniak
>
> Fundacja Wolnego i Otwartego Oprogramowania
>